In parts 1 and 2 of this series, we’ve seen how abortion is dangerous on many levels. Even when we admit the safety benefits of improved medical knowledge and technology, reasonable people still should not grant that abortion is generally safe or that it’s safe for mothers specifically.

Another problem remains, however. If abortion is safer than childbirth then pregnant women may still be justified seeking abortions for safety reasons. But is abortion safer than childbirth? Abortion-choice advocates often claim abortion is safer than childbirth, even claiming that “abortion is 14x’s safer.”[1] How are we to understand this bold claim about “safe abortion”?

The Raymond And Grimes Study

It’s a pretty radical claim to say that abortion is 14 times safer than childbirth. It’s so radical, there’s only one source that claims they can prove it. It’s a journal article from abortion-choice researchers Elizabeth Raymond and David Grimes (hereafter, “RG study”).

This article has become one of the most popular citations regarding “safe abortion.” It’s easy to read (5 pages), easy to access (free online), it’s written by one of the biggest names in the pro-choice lobby (David Grimes), and it cites recognized resources (CDC and Guttmacher). Whenever people say, “Abortion is 14x’s safer than childbirth” they are referencing the RG study (like Reuters, USNews, FoxNews, DailyKos, Time, Reddit, Public Radio, Huffington Post, Relias Media, and Slate).

There is a reason, however, why no other study claims to demonstrate that it is 14x’s safer than childbirth. They can’t corroborate that enormous claim. The RG study might be the most famous, and most widely cited paper on the subject, but despite its popularity, it’s pretty much useless.

Now I know people on the internet can exaggerate things going way beyond the evidence. But I’m picking my words carefully here. The RG study is bad methodology, it’s poorly researched, it’s poorly argued, it’s evidentially weak, it doesn’t support its conclusion, and it isn’t even titled right. This paper is pretty much useless because it’s irreparably flawed.

What’s wrong with the Raymond & Grimes Study, you may ask?

1. The data sets don’t compare

The overarching problem for the RG study is they use critically different data sets that don’t compare with each other.

To illustrate this point consider which is healthier, a dozen elementary children or a dozen senior citizens? Before you answer, would it matter if the elementary children all had terminal cancer and the senior citizens were all part of an endurance running club? When two data sets are compared without controlling for the variables you end up with a faulty comparison. That’s what’s happening in the RG study.

More specifically, the RG study compares the mortality rates for birth mothers and for abortion patients but they didn’t show that those data sets are gathered and sorted in the same way.

Comparing two data sets, without accounting for these critical differences is irresponsible research. That’s why the primary source for the researcher’s data, the Center for Disease Control (CDC), was cited in supreme court testimony showing that the data sets don’t compare (in Gonzalez vs. Planned Parenthood, 550 US 124 [2007], pg. 4).

2. The data sets differ in scope.

How does the RG study make a bad comparison between abortion deaths and childbirth deaths? For one thing, it uses abortion numbers from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) yet these stats exclude Maryland, California, New Hampshire, Washington DC, and New York City. Those places haven’t reported their abortion stats to the CDC in years. Meanwhile, all cities and states are required to report childbirths and any related deaths. If RG were serious about aligning their measurement standards for both data sets, they would have excluded childbirths and pregnancy-related deaths from those same areas. This oversight suppresses the stats on abortion-related fatalities, especially since with California it’s size and politics suggest it might have the most abortions of any state.

3. States are required to report childbirths and maternal deaths, but not abortion or abortion-related deaths.

The reason states like California, Maryland and New Hampshire can avoid reporting abortions and abortion-related death is because all abortion reporting is voluntary. Cities and states aren’t required to report abortions or abortion-related deaths to any state or federal authorities. Meanwhile, they are required to report all childbirths and birth-related deaths. We can only expect disparate numbers since childbirths are carefully and extensively counted for the sake of state population records, tax brackets, census data, and insurance claims. But abortion-related deaths, are only reported on a voluntary basis and many states have no great incentive there either.[2]

It would be monumentally inconvenient to gather and report abortion stats using informal measures since the whole field is steeped in privacy and it’s a political hot button. How can states accurately report on abortion services if they are supposed to stay out of it and not invade women’s privacy on the matter? The RG study overlooks this disparity and offers no balance to correct against it.

4. Voluntary reporting leads to misreporting

Since abortion-related deaths do not have to be reported as such, that means they can be attributed to other causes with no mention of the abortion. When a woman dies from hemorrhaging after an abortion-pill, for example, that abortion might be reported as a miscarriage and the mother’s death chalked up to childbirth-complications. In that way, misreporting can invert the data, faulting childbirth when abortion was to blame.

We don’t currently know how often this may be happening. It could be rare or it could be common. We just don’t know. But we cannot responsibly trust the conclusion of the RG study either till we have some sense of how often those abortion-deaths are masked as childbirth-deaths. Since we are probably only talking about numbers that are a fraction of a percent, then even a small number of misreported abortion-deaths can drastically shift the statistics.[3]

5. The calculations inflate birth-related deaths but not abortion-related deaths.

Another problem is that, compared to abortion mortality rates, the “maternal mortality rate” is inflated. “Maternal mortality is determined by dividing maternal deaths by live births, not by pregnancies. . . . This will necessarily tend to inflate the mortality rate, as many pregnancies end in miscarriage or stillbirth” (Gonzalez vs. Planned Parenthood 2004, pg. 4).[4]

Maternal Mortality Rate (MMR) =

[Numerator] [Denominator]

Number of maternal deaths in childbirth
Number of live births

In other words, the maternal mortality rate takes all birth-related deaths (the numerator) and divides them by only live births (the denominator), so all stillbirths and miscarriages are only addressed in the top number and not the bottom. The result is an inflated mortality rate. This problem doesn’t exist, however, with the abortion mortality rate. So, again, these statistics aren’t comparable.

6. The study deals only in mortality rates

Health and safety are more than just death statistics. The RG study claims to talk about health and safety under the banner of “comparative safety” but the body of the study ignores everything but mortality rates. The title is false advertising. Even if Raymond and Grimes were to prove their case, showing that abortion generates fewer maternal deaths than does childbirth, they would still need to expand their study to include at least a representative set of other health risks before the paper could live up to its title. If RG were more modest in their titling it would fit their study, but as it stands, the title claims more than the article is designed to prove.

7. The study counts all fatalities during pregnancy as caused by child-birth.

If the RG study were trustworthy, they would take care to exclude false positives, where pregnant women die of other causes unrelated to childbirth or abortion. The study is careful to avoid false positives for abortion cases, but not so careful with childbirth cases.[5]

If a woman has an abortion and, on her way home from the clinic, dies in a car accident she would not be included in the RG study. But if the same woman, instead, delivered her child, and was killed in a car accident within one year of giving birth, the RG study would include her as a pregnancy-related death. This is blatant a double-standard. It pads the numbers so RG can make the safety risks in childbirth look worse than they really are. Padded numbers generate bloated conclusions. Not to mention, if an abortion patient dies during the procedure clinicians can chalk that up to “childbirth-related death” so it’s less embarrassing to the family, and they have a better chance of claiming insurance benefits.

This double-standard is all the more troublesome because if the same measure were used for both childbirth and abortion then abortion would appear 2-4x’s deadlier than childbirth.[6] Abortion correlates with higher rates of murder, drug-related death, and suicide, but the RG study excludes those cases from the abortion data while including those cases in the data on childbirth. It’s a flagrant double-standard that, by itself, ruins the credibility of the RG study.

8. The study excludes non-clinical abortion but includes non-clinical childbirth.

Another way the RG stats aren’t comparable is that the study excludes abortions performed outside of a legal clinical setting, while including non-clinical childbirths. All childbirths have to be reported to the state, but abortions do not. Abortion looks safer when it excludes all the Do It Yourself (DIY) abortions, back-alley abortions, and criminal misconduct abortions, such as domestic violence cases killing the mother and child together.

Bear in mind, childbirth is legal in almost any setting, but abortion is not. Some mothers have been known to attempt natural birth at home or in unusual settings like a jacuzzi (water birth), under hypnosis, or in an acupuncture studio. These unconventional approaches can invite obscure risks that don’t reflect the relative safety of childbirth in a conventional hospital delivery.

9. This study is second-hand and less substantial than other works in this subfield.

As far as research articles go, this piece is all icing and no cake. It’s “second-hand” in the sense that the authors rely entirely on borrowed stats (from CDC and Guttmacher) without doing any original research or even reformulating the data to eliminate variables and make them a fair comparison. It’s less substantial in that it’s a short article, drawing a shallow conclusion, from underdeveloped data. It is not pooling and reviewing multiple studies, proposing new insights or refreshing clarity into the field, or pioneering any new or innovative research. It does not have the marks of serious scholarship except that it’s published in a research journal.

10. Their conclusion isn’t supported anywhere else.

Another test for serious scholarship in medical research journals is whether the conclusion can be verified, by repeating it elsewhere. But the RG study fails here too. No other researchers have been able to verify the bloated claim that “abortion is 14x’s safer than childbirth.” Instead, we find multiple studies point the other way. Abortion patients in Denmark, for example, show a higher mortality rate compared with birthing mothers in a 2012 study by Reardon and Coleman and again in a subsequent study the same year. Another 2004 study in Finland established that abortion patients in Finland showed a 6x’s higher suicide rate, 4x’s higher accidental death rate, and 10x’s higher homicide rate compared to other women. Expert Witness Dr. John Thorp Jr., testifying in Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin v. Van Hollen (2013), mentions these and other studies that are all more extensive in their research method and all of them undermine or contradict the RG study.[7]

11. Past abortions can cause pregnancy complications later in life.

Another glaring oversight in the RG study is that it overlooks how past abortions may have increased increase the chance of complications and death in childbirth, later in life. Abortion is tied to ectopic pregnancies, where the fetal human fails to implant in the uterus.[8] Post-abortion women are 2-4xs more likely to have an ectopic pregnancy, and as many as 12% of all maternal deaths are tied to ectopic pregnancies.[9] If a mother dies giving birth, the RG study would count that as a “childbirth-related death” even if all her complications stem from a past abortion.

Pregnancy complications can also stem from pelvic inflammatory disease, a condition occurring in as many as 30% of women post-abortion.[10] And the risk of miscarriage, stillbirth, premature delivery, malformation (disfigured child), escalates as much as 1,000% for women who’ve had abortions.[11] The rate of placenta previa, a life-threatening condition where the placenta covers the cervix, escalates 500-700% for post-abortion women.[12] While most pregnancy complications don’t directly threaten the mother’s life, they can motivate a cesarean section (C-section), and that’s a lot riskier than conventional delivery.

12. The RG Study does not distinguish between inherent and chosen risks

The RG study doesn’t distinguish between the risks built into the procedures and the risks that mothers choose for the sake of reaching their goals. If her goal is to have a healthy baby, she may be willing to risk personal injury or even death to give her child the best chance possible. In some cases, that decision may be foolhardy, but in other cases, it could be heroic. Either way, the heightened risk was not from the procedure itself but from the mother’s choices directing that procedure. In this way, expectant mothers tend to work from a different moral metric then women who just want to terminate the pregnancy. It’s simplistic, and a bit misleading, to ignore the difference between inherent and chosen risks.

The Problems Go beyond the Raymond & Grimes Study

13. Additional reporting problems skew the data

Besides the problems discussed above, there are many other reporting problems undercutting the conclusions in the RG study and any other study claiming to show that abortion is safer than abortion.[13]

Additional risk factors: Anorexia, high blood pressure, obesity, or depression, for example, could override abortion and childbirth as the primary threat to the mother’s life.

Time-Frame: There’s no consensus on the relevant time frame for “abortion-related” or “childbirth-related” fatalities. Six months after? Six weeks after? Six years?

Incomplete Medical Records: A mother’s death can be attributed to a blood clot, hemorrhage, or sepsis instead of the underlying cause, abortion.

Swapping Records: Women can experience life-threatening complications with abortion and go to the ER, but if they don’t report their abortion there, it may be chalked up as childbirth-related complications.

Meticulous vs. Loose Reporting: John Thorpe explains, “[P]regnancy related deaths are systematically sought and investigated by state government-sponsored commissions and the majority of states formally link birth certificates to death certificates. These efforts, which cannot currently be done for [abortion], double the number of pregnancy-related deaths discovered” (art. 18).

14. There simply is no credible comprehensive comparison study for the health risks of abortion and childbirth.

The available data simply isn’t comprehensive enough to support the kind of sweeping claims the RG study. Only partial, incomplete, and suggestive evidence is available at this point. There is no mandatory reporting on abortions, nor abortion complications. And the many factors listed above need to be considered before a meaningful comparison can be made for the U.S. For these reasons, expert witness Dr. John Thorp concludes “any meaningful comparison between the health risks” of abortion and childbirth “is precluded at this time.”[14]

So, the Raymond and Grimes study has proven untrustworthy. And any studies that lean heavily on RG or which use similar methodology are likewise discredited. But even if the source isn’t trustworthy source, is it still correct? Could abortion be safer despite those flaws?

Is Abortion Safer?

The best evidence we have so far suggests childbirth in the U.S. is safer than abortion, but that’s suggestive evidence and not a conclusive comparison. As long as states do not have to report abortions, and as long as shame, silence, and politics suppress the data, then we will struggle to find the extensive and reliable stats needed for journal-quality reporting. Thorp concludes, “There are numerous reasons why any comparison between maternal deaths to abortion deaths,” at this time, is not “valid or sound” (Thorp 2013, art. 15). In short, anyone claiming to have statistical proof that abortion is broadly safer than childbirth is wrong. Before a person can wear the mantle of science declaring “Abortion is safer than childbirth,” he or she will need better statistics than are currently available.

On the contrary, we have lots of suggestive evidence and partial reports indicating that full-term childbirth is likely the safer choice. But our conclusions must be tentative since we lean on outside research from other countries (like Finland and Denmark), and we have to use inference and estimation to fill reporting gaps.

1. There are numerous factors suppressing the data, and they overwhelmingly favor abortion by hiding its true danger.

Institutional Bias Favors Abortion: Abortion-providers have an institutional bias so that, as far as they are legally allowed, they can benefit from under-reporting abortion complications. There are few or no negative consequences if they under-report. They can, instead, report only positive or negligible consequences while creatively attributing any major complications to extenuating circumstances or prior conditions. Childbirth complications, however, are meticulously reported by law.

Reporting Limitations Favor Abortion: There is far better reporting on birth-related complications and death than for abortion. The two main sources for abortion stats are the CDC and Guttmacher Institute. The CDC is hampered by two-levels of voluntary reporting. Clinics voluntarily report to the state health boards. And state health boards voluntarily report to the CDC. Poor cooperation at either level handicaps the CDC. And Guttmacher has a conflict of interest, being the research arm of Planned Parenthood

Complaint Investigations Favor Abortion: Childbirth isn’t the political hot-button that abortion is. With abortion, however, politics and bureaucracy have obstructed responding to abortion complaints.[15] Formal complaints from patients and staff at Kermit Gosnell’s New Jersey clinic fell on deaf ears for more than a decade before authorities investigated. And even then, the original investigation was over drug charges, not abortion.

Insurance Investigations Favor Abortion: Insurance benefits weigh more favorably towards injuries or death from child-birth instead of from abortion. That financial interest encourages people to report complications from childbirth more than with abortion (an elective procedure).

Medical Records Favor Abortion: Since abortion carries a stigma that childbirth does not, medical staff, as a kindness to the patient, may obscure the role of abortion in her medical history. For example, they may report, “death by hemorrhage/sepsis/embolism,” without mentioning her attempted abortion (Calhoun 2013, 268). This is similar to saying “death by blunt force trauma,” instead of “He died in drunk-driving accident.”

2. Patients ashamed of their abortion may never report it, or never seek help for short-term or long-term complications.

Abortion is unusual in that patients are typically quite embarrassed about, even to the point of lying about it in surveys and interviews. This “shame factor” does not just suppress statistics, it creates a practical obstacle for women escalating the risks of abortion. In the short term, if the patient refuses to admit the abortion to her friends and family then she is less likely to have the practical support she needs if a complication arises. Abortion doesn’t typically offer the culture of support that conventional motherhood does, with baby showers, announcement parties, and a small community of eager helpers. Abortion patients often face their risk factors alone, isolated by shame, fear, guilt, and embarrassment.

3. Nations with more precise records show a higher mortality risk for mothers who choose abortion over childbirth.

The U.S. has a reporting problem with abortion. But not every country has the same problem. Thorp explains:

“The U.S. has no national health registry identifying and linking all individual healthcare interventions, diagnoses, hospitalizations, births, deaths, and other vital statistics, unlike Scandinavian countries. Accordingly, epidemiological studies using these national data sets from abroad are methodologically superior to U.S. data” (Thorp 2003, art. 19).

Thorp then cites four different studies that prove the opposite conclusion from the RG study Each study is based in Scandinavian countries with socialized healthcare systems where exact reporting is required for the sake of government funding and supervision. All four studies show that abortion has a higher fatality rate for mothers than childbirth. And all four indicate that modern abortion procedures link to more dangerous outcomes than the RG study admits.

4. Cesarean section births are increasing, often by choice.

With advancing medical technology, childbirth should be safer today than ever before but the rate of complications has remained fairly steady. C-sections could be the cause. Cesarean section delivery is more invasive and riskier than vaginal delivery. And the percentage of c-sections has risen dramatically, from about 21% of births in 2003 to 32% today.[16] Several factors could be cited, and many of these are lifestyle choices rather than inherent risks in childbirth.

Defensive Medicine: This is when physicians are known to “recommend the most aggressive treatment possible to avoid a negligence lawsuit.”[17]

Older mothers: The likelihood of medical complications rises sharply after age 35, and many of those complications hamper and endanger vaginal delivery.

Overweight mothers: Childbirth is hard on the body, and if the mother has weight-related health problems physicians may recommend inducing delivery and c-section to shorten the length of pregnancy.

Fertility Treatments: Some patients use fertility treatments to overcome obstacles like old age, infertility, or physical impairments. However, fertility treatments often result in multiple births, which is a cause for c-sections. And they can make a woman pregnant who, otherwise, isn’t healthy enough to carry a pregnancy full-term. Again, a c-section is a strong possibility.

Patient Request: It’s not uncommon for the patient to request a c-section to avoid the pain of childbirth, for cosmetic reasons, or to fit her delivery into her busy schedule.

Pregnant patients should be aware that defensive medicine, age (35+), weight problems, and fertility treatments can all raise the chances of a c-section, in turn, raising the relative risks for mothers. The mother, requesting a c-section, has only a remote chance of suffering a debilitating injury or death, but it’s still a higher chance than otherwise.

The Final Verdict

Returning to our original question, abortion is not clearly safer than childbirth. And, depending on how one weighs the evidence, it may be far more dangerous. We are left to wonder about “safe, legal, and rare” abortion. If it’s not rare, or safe, why is it still legal? Legalizing abortion has led to roughly 60,000,000 abortions, averaging about 1.3 million a year since 1973. With that kind of demand, we cannot realistically expect all abortion clinics to run safely, nor all pregnant mothers to avoid DIY and back-alley abortions. Abortion procedures could be far safer today than in 1972, but that detail is mitigated by the sheer number of abortions happening on a regular basis. Abortion isn’t rare, or safe.

Advocates still may press the point, claiming abortion is safer than childbirth, 14 times safer. But the source behind that is thoroughly debunked across multiple sources, most notably in court records from John Thorp Jr., a review study by Byron Calhoun, and it’s been contradicted by a number of smaller but more meticulous studies in Scandinavia, where they do not have the same reporting gaps as the U.S. At the ground level, abortion is clearly dangerous to families, to motherhood, and to society as it fosters a culture of death and dehumanizes the most defenseless members of the human race. And of course, it’s deadly to fetal humans. Every year, roughly 1 in 5 pregnancies end in abortion. That fatality rate destroys all semblance of “safe” abortion. Abortion isn’t even safe for the mother since none of the intrinsic risks with abortion are necessary – it’s an elective procedure.

Childbirth does carry health risks, and expectant mothers should be informed and proactive about them. We can admit the need for better data in comparing and clarifying those risks. But the best evidence we have so far suggests abortion is probably more dangerous than childbirth.

[5]The RG study explains that the stats for deaths related to childbirth include “deceased women who were recorded as pregnant within a specified time period before death” (RG 2012, pg. 215). Whether or not those women died from childbirth and related complications is unknown.

[6] David C. Reardon, et al. “Deaths Associated with Abortion Compared to Childbirth – A Review of New and Old Data and the Medical and Legal Implications,” Journal of Contemporary Health Law & Policy 20, no. 2, art. 4 (2004), 278-327.

In part 1, “Is Abortion Safe?”, we saw how abortion isn’t safe in the normal sense of the word. It’s not safe for the family, for motherhood, for society, for culture, and it’s definitely not safe for children-in-utero. But for many abortion-choice advocates “safe” abortion isn’t about those other things. They aren’t talking about safety generally, they are only talking about the mother’s safety. For abortion-choice advocates, “safe abortion” means that when a woman chooses to have an abortion she can have a low-risk abortion free from dangerous outside interference.

Is abortion safe in this narrow sense where only the mother’s safety is in view?

Perilous Pregnancies

In rare cases, pregnant women can experience life-threatening complications to where the mother cannot carry the child to term without putting her own life in imminent danger.[1] We’ll call these life-threatening cases “perilous pregnancies.” About 1.5% of pregnant women (146.6 per 10,000) experience severe complications, and in some of those cases attempting childbirth would almost certainly kill both the mother and her child.[2]

Back before Roe v. Wade, in 1973, when mothers were facing a perilous pregnancy it was legal to perform abortions as a life-saving measure for the mother.[3] Whenever a complicated pregnancy posed an immanent threat to the mother’s life, Ob-Gyn professionals were trained and ready to perform an abortion as a last resort. So, it’s not as if women had to die from dangerous pregnancies before Roe but now with Roe in place those women are safe. Perilous pregnancies happened before and after Roe.

In those difficult cases, where either the child dies or both of them die, pro-lifers are justified in supporting protective measures for the only lives that can be saved. That’s because pro-lifers are pro-life not just pro-child.

Perilous pregnancies are real, they’re tough, and they’re a serious issue for pro-lifers to wade through. But they don’t prove that abortion is safe for the mother. So, we’re left with the vast majority of pregnancies where abortion doesn’t save her life. Is abortion safe for the mother in these other cases?

Is Abortion Generally Safe for Mothers?

It turns out that even when there aren’t any serious complications in pregnancy, abortion still isn’t very safe for the mother.

Pregnancy is a healthy condition to be in. So, the risks involved in abortion don’t cure anything. Abortion is an elective procedure, so all its risks are elective too. Aside from the 1.5% of pregnancies that have serious complications, the mother doesn’t need an abortion to help her achieve physical or mental health.

2. Surgical abortion is inherently risky

All abortions carry risks. Besides routine side effects like bleeding, cramping, nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, and diarrhea, which all occur in pill and surgical abortions alike, there’s the risk of serious complications. According to one study, 2.1% or around 21,000 abortion patients per year experience serious complications relating to their abortion.[4] Compare this to pregnancy and childbirth where, according to another study only 1.47% of pregnant mothers experience serious complications.[5] Many more studies could be cited, and they do not all agree, but it should be clear that abortion has inherent risks.

Abortion-related complications can stem from the tools involved in the procedure. Surgical abortion has tools for cutting, tearing, and stretching. So, abortion risks include slicing, punctures, tears, scrapes, bruises, muscle and ligament damage, and severe bleeding. And if any fetal tissue is left behind, that can cause further internal damage. Any wounds and blood transfer can get infected causing new complications. More serious complications include organ damage, sepsis, scarring and disfigurement, permanent damage to the cervix, and even death.

3. Pill-abortion is even riskier

Pill Abortions might seem less risky, since pills are less invasive than surgery, but they are actually about 350% riskier.[6] This is because patients conduct these abortions at home, without close medical supervision. But patients don’t always know how much pain or bleeding is too much or whether their side-effects are normal. With pill abortions minor problems can become life-threatening risks very quickly.

6. Abortion hurts motherhood

This point was mentioned in part 1 of the series [insert link], but it deserves a fuller treatment here. Abortion is a direct threat to motherhood. Traditionally, motherhood is the iconic example of tender loving care. There is no more delicate and beautiful image of caregiving than a mother holding and nursing her young. Abortion-choice ideology, however, redefines motherhood to include the privilege of killing one’s own child-in-utero. Those two scenes don’t fit together. The model example of caregiving doesn’t fit with deliberately killing one’s own innocent non-threatening child in the womb.

Of course, not every woman wants to be a mother. And that’s fine. But many women do. And many other women just want to keep that option open in the future. So, it’s important to preserve and protect the cultural status of “mother” so that women who do want to become mothers one day have plenty of freedom, support, and social acceptance when they do. It’s important, for their sake, that the role of motherhood doesn’t shrivel down to something strange and forsaken. Abortion choice ideology, however, lacks the practical reinforcements to help protect and preserve motherhood as a positive fixture in society.

Conventionally, one of the most common protective measures for motherhood has been traditional husband-wife marriage. That way, if she gets pregnant the husband cannot just abandon her without legal ramifications. Plus, with a gainfully employed supportive husband, she can be free to take maternity leave, revert to part-time status, or maybe even stay at home for the sake of the baby. Homemaking isn’t a perfect solution, but it did help establish layers of protection for the role of “mother.” But, back in 1963 Betty Friedan, in Feminine Mystique, began to set a different tone. Speaking for modern pro-choice feminism she said “women have outgrown the housewife role,” and homemaking and motherhood are “dehumanizing” and a “comfortable concentration camp.“[18] Not surprisingly, the marriage rate has been declining for many years now: “For the first time in American history,” says psychologist Steven Fritz, “a majority of adults now live outside of marriage—as single parents, as partners in a cohabitating relationship, or as singles.”[19] Fritz goes on to admit that this trend bodes poorly for motherhood, child-rearing, and family. If mothers are going to have the freedom to succeed as mothers they need more support than single-parenthood offers, more relational security than cohabitation can offer, and they can’t be relegated to singlehood forever.

To be sure, many pro-choicers view homemaking and motherhood in a positive light. But pro-choice culture, overall, hasn’t necessarily strengthened or reinforced the role of motherhood in society. Recent studies have verified this suspicion showing, compared to pro-lifers, pro-choicers, generally, have a more negative view of motherhood[20] and smaller families.[21] Former abortion-choice activist, Frederica Mathewes-Green helps explain this unsettling perspective.

This issue [of motherhood] gets presented as if it’s a tug of war between the woman and the baby. We see them as mortal enemies, locked in a fight to the death. But that’s a strange idea, isn’t it? It must be the first time in history when mothers and their own children have been assumed to be at war. We’re supposed to picture the child attacking her, trying to destroy her hopes and plans, and picture the woman grateful for the abortion, since it rescued her from the clutches of her child.[22]

Instead of reinforcing a positive role for motherhood in society, abortion-choice culture pulls the other way. When pro-choice advocates describe the child-in-utero as a “parasite,”“burden,” “punishment,” or “disease”, how else can we interpret their view of motherhood except that motherhood is sickening burdensome punishment?

***

Abortion isn’t safe for Mothers

In parts 1 and 2 of this series, we’ve seen how abortion is dangerous on many levels, so that we cannot grant that abortion is generally safe or that it’s safe for mothers. Abortion procedures may be safer in some regards than they were before Roe v. Wade in 1973. But, overall, abortion is dangerous for the family, for motherhood, for society, for culture, and it is looming death for children-in-utero. Nor does abortion generally promote the health and well-being of mothers except in the rare case of perilous pregnancies. In almost 99% of cases, however, abortion carries a host of unnecessary risks for women, both long-term and short-term risks, threatening women’s health, psychologically, physically, and relationally. We cannot honestly conclude that abortion is generally safe for mothers.

Endnotes

[1] Regarding complicated pregnancies where serious intervention is required, neonatalogist, Kendra Kolb distinguishes between direct intentional abortion vs. indirect and unintentional killing when she says, “there is no medical reason why the life of the child must be directly and intentionally ended with an abortion procedure.” See, Kendra Kolb, “the Pro-Life Reply to ‘Abortion Can Be Medically Necessary,” [Video] LiveAction (30 July 2019), 0:45, at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TmomK2RB2A. Strictly speaking, both categories – (1) direct-intentional and (2) indirect-unintentional – could qualify as abortion as they bring about the demise of the fetal human. But the more common use of “abortion” refers to terminating the pregnancy by directly and intentionally killing the fetal human through a conventional method of abortion (ex., vacuum-aspiration, dilation and evacuation, induction, etc.).

[21] See, J. Kevern, and Jeremy Freese, “Differential Fertility as a Determinant of Trends in Public Opinion about Abortion in the United States,” SSRN (July 7, 2014), 35pgs., at https://ssrn.com/abstract=2463472

In some ways, abortion is safer than it was.

When abortion was legalized nationwide in 1973, abortion patients were not routinely given antibiotics so they were prone to infection. Sonogram technology wasn’t widespread either. That meant abortion doctors couldn’t see into the womb during procedures. So, there was a greater chance for nicks, cuts, and punctures. Also, some of the riskier methods of abortion have been marginalized too, like saline abortions.[1] Clearly, abortion procedures can be safer now than before because of gains in medical knowledge and technology.

Legalizing abortion did not however shift abortions from back-alleys to clinics. As early as 1960 abortion procedures were primarily done in clinical/hospital settings.[2] But the clinics themselves are now able to offer safer procedure, for mothers, with sonograms, and a policy of general antibiotics for all patients.[3]

The medical field surrounding abortion has improved over the last 40 years, so we can expect that surgical procedures like abortion can be performed in safer ways than were possible in the 1960’s and 70’s. So, there’s a legitimate sense in which abortion is safer than it was before. But safer doesn’t mean safe.

Safer doesn’t mean safe.

It’s good to reduce health risks and physical traumas, but if abortion is still inherently violent and dangerous, then it’s not safe. We aren’t dismissing real medical advances, we’re just trying to be honest about what abortion is and what it does to everyone involved. Abortion may be less dangerous, in some ways, than it was in the mid-20th century but we haven’t answered whether it’s safe.

So, is abortion safe?

1. “Safe abortion” isn’t about “safety” in the normal sense of the word.

For abortion-choice advocates “safe abortion” is only about the mother’s safety. Abortion isn’t safe for everyone involved so the only way for abortion to be “safe” is by using the word in a different way than how people normally use it.[4]

We cannot emphasize enough how important the mother is here. When a mother faces an unplanned pregnancy, it’s her body, her livelihood, her health and her well-being on the line. Whatever else is going on, whoever else might be affected, her body is still the only place where conventional abortion can happen.

The mother’s safety is incredibly important, but if she is safe during an abortion that doesn’t make abortion safe overall.

To understand how “safety” is redefined here, imagine if you and I were caught in a tornado. If a raging tornado is barreling down on us. We could stay safe by hiding in a good sturdy storm shelter. But even if we were spared from harm, that doesn’t make the tornado safe. The tornado was a violent and potentially deadly event, even if you and I were unscathed. Abortion isn’t the same as a tornado, obviously. The point is that abortion could still be very dangerous even if the mother isn’t harmed by it. She’s not the only individual who can be harmed by abortion. So, if abortion is “safe” in any meaningful sense, we have to ask, “for whom?”

2. Abortion isn’t safe for children-in-utero

At the risk of sounding like Captain Obvious, we have to point out that tiny humans in the womb are catastrophically harmed by so-called “safe abortion.” It’s misleading to call abortion “safe” without mentioning how it’s designed to kill. And if you’ve ever seen a dismemberment abortion or a suction abortion, you know it’s a violent death too. Nobody is safe in a procedure designed to kill them.

And the manner of killing involved in abortion doesn’t help that case either. The instruments used in abortion are designed to trap, tear, crush, cut, sever, suction, and evacuate the remains of tiny human beings. If these tools were used on anyone else, at another stage in life, we’d call it “cruel and unusual.” Any boast about “safe abortion” is muffled beneath the silent scream of millions of abortion victims.

3. Abortion isn’t safe for motherhood

Besides harming fetal humans, abortion is also dangerous to motherhood. The abortion procedure is violent action on the mother, on the child, and on the relationship between them.[5] It severs one of the most iconic relationships, the emblem of gentle care and loving protection: motherhood. A mother-with-child is the picture of loving care. Abortion-choice culture, however, puts a negative spin on motherhood by redefining “motherhood” to include the privilege of intentionally killing one’s children in their most helpless state.

That doesn’t sound like “motherhood” anymore. Abortion-choice policy can pit mother against child as if she is the “owner” or “master” of that child-in-utero with full rights of disposing and killing her unwanted property. In that way, abortion-choice ideology treats unwanted fetal humans as a “burden,” a “punishment,” or a “disease.” When abortion-choice is included in maternity, motherhood shifts from a pure emblem of gentle loving care to sometimes hostile territory, weaponizing the womb.

4. Abortion isn’t safe for the family.

Any time a child is killed, even a child-in-utero, the rest of the family has lost a member. Children have lost a sibling. The father and mother have lost a child. Grandparents have lost a grandchild. That’s a real loss.

And whenever that abortion has negative side-effects on the mother, psychologically or physically, the rest of the family can feel that too. If you have ever lived with a family member struggling through depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, generalized anxiety, or suicidal thoughts (and abortion correlates with all of these) – then you know that these are real difficulties for the whole family even if they center on one person.[6]

5. Abortion isn’t safe for society.

Abortion choice policy does not just affect individuals, or just mothers, or just communities, it ripples across the widest social spheres affecting all of society. One way abortion hurts society is through a divisive power-differential. Abortion-choice policy pits the haves against the have-nots. Children-in-utero are voiceless, defenseless, and innocent, the most vulnerable of marginalized groups. Even compared to mothers facing an unplanned pregnancy – and those mothers are often in crisis – the unborn children they carry are even more helpless and imperiled than they are.

Abortion also disproportionately affects black and minority communities. Currently, black mothers resort to abortion 4x’s more than white mothers.[7] Don’t forget, race-based and sex-selective abortion are also legal in the U.S.[8] If these harms against children-in-utero were happening with any other class or group of humans in America we’d consider that a cancerous lesion on the face of society, an embarrassment to our claimed status of “civilization.” Society is in great peril when it’s legal to kill individual humans because of their biological sex, ethnicity, or skin color.

6. Abortion isn’t safe for culture

Abortion-choice policy is a dangerous precedent in culture because it normalizes a dehumanizing and deadly act against innocent human beings. There’s no scientific dispute about whether fetal humans are homo sapiens. From conception, every child-in-utero is a literal and distinct biological human.[9] Yet abortion-choice advocates overwhelmingly suppress and avoid any mention of the humanity of fetal humans. Sadly, that tactic helps make it easier to excuse killing the unborn.[10]

Fetal humans are denied even the protection we extend to household pets, farm animals, or endangered species.[11] Abortion-choice advocates typically reject fetal personhood, yet abortion choice policy doesn’t even protect fetal humans against animal abuse. The fetal human is legally reduced to property, subject to live dismemberment, mutilation, and desecration (of the corpse) as long that’s what his or her owner so chooses. That treatment of fetal humans sends humanitarian society backward 150 years, to when it was legal to treat marginalized members of the human race like disposable property.

But the societal fallout from abortion gets even darker. Abortion-choice culture installs death-profiteering as a societal norm. A whole industry makes it’s living primarily by killing unwanted human beings.[12] And we’re not talking about war deaths or killing in self-defense. We’re talking about killing defenseless fetal humans who never held a gun, never committed a crime, and killing them at a rate that dwarfs all the war casualties in U.S. history.[13]

***

Abortion isn’t safe

Abortion is dangerous on many levels so that we cannot grant that abortion is generally safe. Maybe the abortion procedure is safer in some regards than it was before Roe v. Wade in 1973. But, overall abortion is dangerous for the family, for motherhood, for society, for culture, and it’s looming death for children-in-utero.

Endnotes

[2] Mary Calderone estimates as many as 90% of illegal abortions were performed in clinical settings, even though she was writing 7 years before any state formally sanctioned abortion (Colorado, 1967), and 13 years before it would be federally legalized. Mary Calderone, “Illegal Abortion as a Public Health Problem,” American Journal of Health 50 (July I960): 949.

[5] Abortion-choice advocates might not see abortion as violence against the mother since, presumably, she consented to the procedure. But even a routine surgical abortion, with no serious complications, is still an invasive act, through her sexual organs, using sharp medical instruments to dismember and suction the fetal human from inside her uterus, typically causing physical pain, bleeding, minor internal cuts, scrapes, and soreness, and carries additional side effects from the anesthesia, pain-killers, and antibiotics (like nausea and flu-like symptoms).

[11] According to current animal cruelty laws it’s illegal to deliberately torture cats and dogs to death, and that includes dismemberment or chemical burning (two methods used in human abortion). And even with farm animals animal cruelty laws require that the animal be rendered unconscious before slaughter. Of course, engaged species are even more protected so that any deliberate killing is illegal. See, ALDF, “Laws that Protect Animals,” Animal Legal Defense Fund (Cotati, CA: N.D.), https://aldf.org/article/laws-that-protect-animals/

[12] For the 2017-2018 fiscal year, Planned Parenthood reported administering 332,757 abortions (see pg. 27 of the Annual Report). Guttmacher Institute estimates that the average pill-abortion costs around $535 and the average surgical abortion, at 10 weeks gestation, was $508. Planned parenthood, however, reports that even 1st-trimester abortions can cost as much as $1,500, and later trimester abortions broach $3,275 and higher as they approach and enter the third-term. There is no single rate across all planned parenthood centers, and since Planned Parenthood does not publicly self-report their revenue from abortion services we have to make an educated guess. One survey indicates the average cost of an abortion in 2018 nationwide was $598. Using this estimate, Planned Parenthood would have earned about $200 million. This number, however, could be much higher than that depending on what related service-fees might be included in the abortion procedure (consultation, pregnancy testing, preliminary imaging, anesthesia, antibiotics, follow-up appointment, etc.).

Does having a child mean your life is over? In this devotional message from Dr. John Ferrer we see how pro-life Christians can counteract abortion-choice culture with the knowledge that sacrificial living is the only way to TRULY live.

***

“Then Jesus said to His disciples, ‘If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me.For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.'”Matthew 16:24-25, NASB

Abortion isn’t just a surgical procedure. It’s not just an action, a choice, or a policy. It’s also a culture. Abortion-choice culture is a range of institutions and actions driven by a specific set of ideas about women, sex, motherhood, children, family, and liberty. Somewhere packed inside that culture is a set of expectations about what “normal” women and families should be like.

Rachel Jankovic, a mother of seven children, is decidedly abnormal. She writes:

Everywhere you go, people want to talk about your children. Why you shouldn’t have had them, how you could have prevented them, and why they would never do what you have done. They want to make sure you know that you won’t be smiling anymore when they are teenagers. All this at the grocery store, in line, while your children listen.

The truth is that, years ago, before this generation of mothers was even born, our society decided where children rank in the list of important things. When abortion was legalized, we wrote it into law.

Children rank way below college. Below world travel for sure. Below the ability to go out at night at your leisure. Below honing your body at the gym. Below any job you may have or hope to get. In fact, children rate below your desire to sit around and pick your toes, if that is what you want to do. Below everything. Children are the last thing you should ever spend your time on.

If you grew up in this culture, it is very hard to get a biblical perspective on motherhood, to think like a free Christian woman about your life, your children. (source: “Motherhood is a Calling,” DesiringGod.org)

Jankovic is happily wed in Christian marriage, to her first husband, and with her seven children, she is a walking testimony to the glory of biblical Christian family. She’s a countercultural hero. And she’s not the only one to recognize how abortion-choice ideas have saturated popular culture.

Abortion ideology tells women their life is over once you have kids. It says that children are more burden than blessing, marriage is disposable, and sex is just a leisure activity with no strings attached.

Abortion-choice culture is hostile to many of the central values of Christian living.

Another woman, Frederica Mathewes-Green arrived at the same conclusion but she began her journey on the inside of that culture, as a vocal pro-choice advocate. Speaking of her days advocating for abortion choice, before Roe v. Wade, she says:

We expected that abortion would be rare. What we didn’t realize was that, once abortion becomes available, it becomes the most attractive option for everyone around the pregnant woman. If she has an abortion, it’s like the pregnancy never existed. No one is inconvenienced. It doesn’t cause trouble for the father of the baby, or her boss, or the person in charge of her college scholarship. It won’t embarrass her mom and dad. . . . there is significant pressure on a woman to choose abortion, rather than adoption or parenting.

A woman who had had an abortion told me, “Everyone around me was saying they would ‘be there for me’ if I had the abortion, but no one said they’d ‘be there for me’ if I had the baby.” For everyone around the pregnant woman, abortion looks like the sensible choice. A woman who determines instead to continue an unplanned pregnancy looks like she’s being foolishly stubborn. It’s like she’s taken up some unreasonable hobby. People think, if she would only go off and do this one thing, everything would be fine.

But that’s an illusion. Abortion can’t really “turn back the clock.” It can’t push the rewind button on life and make it so she was never pregnant. It can make it easy for everyone around the woman to forget the pregnancy, but the woman herself may struggle. . . . life stretches on after abortion, for months and years — for many long nights — and all her life long she may ponder the irreversible choice she made.

This issue gets presented as if it’s a tug of war between the woman and the baby. We see them as mortal enemies, locked in a fight to the death. But that’s a strange idea, isn’t it? It must be the first time in history when mothers and their own children have been assumed to be at war. We’re supposed to picture the child attacking her, trying to destroy her hopes and plans, and picture the woman grateful for the abortion since it rescued her from the clutches of her child. (Source: “When Abortion Suddenly Stopped making Sense,” National Review)

Mathewes-Green goes on to say that abortion culture isn’t just mistaken, it’s layers of violent oppression against women. She first realized this after viewing a recording of an abortion. Before the days of sonograms, people still thought 19-week old children in utero were just inchoate globs. She wasn’t sure what to expect in a chemical abortion. The abortionist inserted the needle into the middle of the mother’s abdomen, into the baby’s chest. The syringe was still for a few moments. Then it moved, vigorously. The tiny child was struggling against the needle, struggling for life.

There I was, anti-war, anti-capital punishment, even vegetarian, and a firm believer that social justice cannot be won at the cost of violence. Well, this sure looked like violence. How had I agreed to make this hideous act the centerpiece of my feminism? . . . . Once I recognized the inherent violence of abortion, none of the feminist arguments made sense. (Source: “When Abortion Suddenly Stopped Making Sense,” National Review)

These two women are coming from very different paths, yet arriving at the same conclusion. Popular culture is saturated with the abortion-choice ideology, and that spells violent harm to women and their families. They both came to understand that . . .

Pro-life is Pro-woman.

Jankovic offers additional clarity on the subject, from a Christian perspective. Recognizing the opposition that pro-life Christians face in an abortion-friendly culture she says:

Christian mothers carry their children in hostile territory. When you are in public with them, you are standing with and defending, the objects of cultural dislike. You are publicly testifying that you value what God values and that you refuse to value what the world values. You stand with the defenseless and in front of the needy. You represent everything that our culture hates because you represent laying down your life for another . . . Laying down your own life, in any way, is terrifying. Strangely, it is that fear that drives the abortion industry: fear that your dreams will die, that your future will die, that your freedom will die — and trying to escape that death by running into the arms of death.

Jankovic might sound like she’s surrendering too much ground to abortion culture as she admits that women are deathly afraid of losing their individual identity in motherhood. Women are, justifiably, scared about the prospect of “dying” to themselves. Abortion sounds like it would make sense, in light of those fears. But she’s not done yet.

There’s more to the storywhen Christ is the main character.

“Christian[s] should have a different paradigm”, Jankovic says,

We should run to the cross. To death. . . . Death to yourself is not the end of the story. We, of all people, ought to know what follows death. The Christian life is resurrection life, life that cannot be contained by death, the kind of life that is only possible when you have been to the cross and back. The Bible is clear about the value of children. Jesus loved them, and we are commanded to love them, to bring them up in the nurture of the Lord. We are to imitate God and take pleasure in our children.

The prospect of motherhood, pregnancy, and childbirth is really scary. Choosing life, especially with big families, can be terrifying because it’s wildly countercultural. But in the face of these fears we don’t have to surrender, like cowards, to popular culture. We don’t have to retreat to abortion and kill our young like captured POW’s. No, we can be heroes for our children, laying down our lives in sacrificial living. And we do this not by our own strength. We draw strength from the risen Christ. Our life in Christ is resurrection powered. We can gladly lay down our lives for our loved ones because “whoever loses his life for Christ’s sake will find it.”

The question however, is not whether the writer Jeltsen or her interviewee are biased, progressive, abortion-lobbyists, liberal-democrat, or any of that. The big question here is whether she’s telling the truth. The truth is the truth, no matter the source.

But it doesn’t hurt to know the source for controversial claims, and this article has a lot of them. HuffPo sought an expert voice to give a negative review of the movie. Enter Dr. Jen Villavicencio, an Ob-Gyn and abortion provider. HuffPo is unabashedly liberal-progressive, and Dr. Villavicencio, is financially and vocationally tied to abortion practice. This article was never intended to be a “fair and balanced” review of the movie. There are layers of bias here. While that fact doesn’t falsify this article, it doesn’t lend any credibility either. Responsible readers should give pause before swallowing what Villavicencio is feeding them.

But again, the question is not whether this report is biased, pro-choice, or partisan. The question is whether Dr. Villavicenio is telling the truth.

If only she were telling the truth. Let’s look at her major claims and test them for accuracy.

1. “A fetus unrealistically appears to struggle for its life against an abortion”

She’s referring to the suction-abortion procedure, in the film, for a 13 weeks pregnant mother. Now, she’d have a hard time making this claim with reference to late-term abortions, since viable children-in-utero have survived premature birth as early as 21.5 weeks, and they, indisputably, respond to stimuli and reflect a pain response. Only 1st and early 2nd trimester abortions could realistically fit within this sweeping claim.

Still, there are a couple problem here. First, the fetus is a human fetus, that is, a biological human. We have not slipped from human abortion to generic undifferentiated animal abortion of whatever kinds. Leaving out the “human” in “human fetus” is dehumanizing. It’s not false but it is misleading in the sense of biased rhetoric, and that’s worth noting.

Second, the fetal human is a male or female (or, in rare cases, intersex), but not an “it.” Again, it’s dehumanizing to treat the fetal human like a mere object (an “it”) instead of subjective pronoun (he/she/him/her).

Third, and to the author’s point, it is realistic to portray the fetal human, at 13 weeks, reflecting the known neural and motor development of human fetuses at that stage. The film does that. Now, Dr. Villavicenio seems offended that fetal movement, responding to environmental stimuli, can give the appearance of self-awareness and some conscious struggle for survival. But, the facts of the matter are that fetal children, at that stage of development, have a brain and nervous system, and they are capable of a wide range of movements, on their own, and even have a sense of touch. Being touch-sensitive, they can respond to environmental stimuli whether it’s the mother touching her belly, or an abortion-surgeon using a canella to vacuum him out of the womb.

The ACOG, which is an abortion-choice organization, does make this claim. But they are mistaken. Its common practice now, among fetal surgeons, to administer anesthesia to both child and mother before procedures. The reason is simple, children-in-utero exhibit a pain/stress response during surgery that raises complications, unless they are anesthetized. The child benefits from anesthesia the same way the mother does; it reduces pain.

The 24 weeks gestation claim, is outdated too. In the past, 24 weeks was thought to be the cut-off for fetal viability. But, since premature babies have survived as early as 21.5 weeks, we know from direct experience with born children that they reflect all the features of pain-sensitivity.

Now, critics eagerly dispute whether that child is experiencing pain or just acting that way. But that’s disingenuous because it veers from medical science into philosophy of mind, without signaling a lane change. Philosophers love to argue about “the problem of other minds,” and whether anybody can know (with certainty) that other minds exist. It’s a pet argument for skeptics to haggle over. They argue, for example, that a person may act like he’s feeling pain but since we can only see his actions, not his pain-experience, we’ll never know if he experiences pain or if he has any experiences at all.

To my knowledge, that argument is not a serious facet of medical science, nor should it be. We are on much safer ground, in bioethics, granting that individuals who have physiological pain responses are in pain. We don’t need to detour into a sophisticated argument about minds, consciousness, or personhood. We’re just talking about physiological pain, and fetal children can feel that somewhere between 8 and 20 weeks gestation.

This one is kind of funny to me. Planned Parenthood does sell abortion services. They aren’t doing it for free. Plus, the movie admits that Planned Parenthood is officially a non-profit organization.

And anyone who’s worked with non-profit and not-for-profit organizations understands that they still have to generate income just to stay afloat.

It’s naïve to think that just because Planned Parenthood has a non-profit tax status, that they are simply a self-effacing charity group, entirely blind to the allure of profits and financial growth. Now, Planned Parenthood maintains enormous financial sway, politically and culturally, as the leading figure in the abortion-choice lobby. And abortion-choice lobbyists are firmly entrenched on Democrat battle lines. So, there is a lot of money invested in keeping Planned Parenthood afloat. But even if Planned Parenthood weren’t a billion dollar company, there is nothing false or dishonest about describing planned parenthood as a for-profit operating model even if they are non-profit in their tax status.

Yes, their most recent report says abortion is 3.4% of their services. But this twisted statistic is dishonest. Abortion is their primary service, it’s their means of revenue, and it’s the main reason people go to the clinic – they think they might be pregnant, and they are considering abortion. Abortion services are not 3.4% of their revenue, or 3.4% of what they advocate and lobby for, or 3.4% of their focused attention. But with some statistical gymnastics, they can produce a nice, small number so that Planned parenthood looks like it’s mostly just a walk-in healthcare clinic for women. But, Washington Post fact-checker debunked this “3% statistics. And Slate Magazine calls it the “most meaningless statistic ever.”Rich Lowry, writing for the New York Post, explains how this number is so misleading.

“By Planned Parenthood’s math, a woman who gets an abortion but also a pregnancy test, an STD test and some contraceptives has received four services, and only 25 percent of them are abortion. This is a little like performing an abortion and giving a woman an aspirin, and saying only half of what you do is abortion.

Such cracked reasoning could be used to obscure the purpose of any organization. The sponsors of the New York City Marathon could count each small cup of water they hand out (some 2 million cups, compared with 45,000 runners) and say they are mainly in the hydration business.

Or Major League Baseball teams could say that they sell about 20 million hot dogs and play 2,430 games in a season, so baseball is only .012 percent of what they do.” (Para. 11-13)

5. “Abortions are sensationalized like a horror movie”

Abortion is horrifying, that’s true, but that’s realism, not sensationalism. The movie is actually pretty tame compared to actual horror movies. I was expecting more images of dismembered babies, and far more blood than the movie had. I remember only a couple scenes that had any significant blood in it. One was a pill abortion where the mother had significant bleeding, but that’s an accurate description of known side effects of pill abortions. They didn’t need to exaggerate. Realism is horrifying enough.

The other bloody scene was of a teenager who hemorrhages during an abortion, and the surgeon has to act fast to stop the bleeding. She doesn’t die, but she loses a lot of blood. There’s no serious dispute about whether severe bleeding is a complication that sometimes happens in abortions.

6. “Abortion is inaccurately depicted as extremely dangerous.”

The movie does focus attention on the negative outcomes of abortion, including medical risks, complications, family issues, and so on. But it’s still honest about all of these. Abortion is extremely dangerous since it has a fatality rate of 100% for all children-in-utero. And, since it’s an elective procedure, none of its side effects, risk factors, and potential complications are necessary conditions of pregnancy.

It’s dishonest to act like abortion doesn’t have any risk of serious complications like bleeding, punctures, cuts, organ damage, cervical damage, or infection. I’m not saying these happen all the time, and neither does the movie say that. But abortion does have serious risks.

Now, we don’t exactly know how often women have serious complications short-term or long-term with abortion since the whole field is notoriously private. Women often hide past abortions, even in their medical history. Plus, there is no formal required reporting for abortion complications. So, when you read stats like: “only 4 women died of [abortion] complications” (para. 21)– you should know that that statistic doesn’t mean very much. Hospitals aren’t required to say that a woman died from an attempted abortion; they can just as easily report it as death from pregnancy complications. That reporting bias makes insurance payouts easier and helps spare the family some embarrassment.

7. “Abortion clinicians are portrayed as villains and monsters”

Some are portrayed that way, some aren’t. Abby Johnson does tell about her own, direct, experience with clinic directors and representatives and she was even taken to court by Planned Parenthood. But she won the case because she was telling the truth. Sadly, it’s not uncommon for some people to take on the “villain” role in the workplace. Abby had a boss, in the movie, who was clearly the “villain” in the movie. This phenomenon isn’t unique to abortion clinics, it’s liable to happen at any big company that fosters competition and rewards ambition. It would be unreasonable and dishonest to present all abortion-clinicians in a positive light.

Meanwhile, this movie was actually pretty gracious in the way it portrayed abortion-clinicians. For one thing, the main character spent most of the movie employed with Planned Parenthood. The storyline revolved around her good intentions, her struggle through abortion-choice ideology, her sympathy for struggling mothers, and her passion for helping abortion nurses. Most of her coworkers were jovial, likable characters who were just doing what they thought was right – working for Planned Parenthood. The movie’s treatment of clinic workers has proven so compelling and persuasive that as many as 94 clinic workers left the abortion-business after watching Unplanned.

8. “Prayer has magical properties, can stop abortions.”

The movie didn’t claim this, not explicitly at least. The statement refers to a claim by Abby’s character who says that when protesters are praying outside Planned Parenthood clinics, the rate of abortions that day goes down. But, right after this statement, she explains that patients driving to the clinic drive around and around the clinic to avoid being seen, but the prayer protesters are there watching. So potential patients just eventually just drive away, leaving the clinic and missing their appointments.

Now, the movie features some “prayer warriors” in the form of Shawn and Marilisa Carney, leaders in the Forty Days for Life movement. They have a powerful influence on Abby Johnson, eventually helping her to leave planned parenthood and mobilize as a pro-life advocate. So, there is definitely a pro-life message that’s focused on prayer. But they aren’t making any claim that prayer has magical properties. The main characters are all Christians anyway, and so the real “power” behind prayer isn’t magic, or luck, or will-power. The power behind prayer is God. If Christianity is true, and prayer works, then that prayer works because an intelligent personal God heard and responded to those prayers, that’s not magic, that’s just how communication works.

Yes, Democrats blocked a bill that would protect infants who survived botched abortions. Yes, that ties abortion-choice into child-abuse, ablism, mercy-killing, and infanticide. No, it does not necessarily mean Democrats hate babies or want more abortions. But it still isn’t clear why they voted that way. In this post, I explore possible reasons why Democrats would risk such bad publicity and vote against basic protection for abortion-survivors.

On Monday (2.25.2019) forty-four Senate Democrats voted down the “Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act”. This bill would require that any children that are born, surviving abortion, must be treated as persons and cared-for as patients. This vote killed the bill, at least as long as Democrats have the Senate majority. Republicans needed 60 votes to break the standing filibuster. Democrats had been stalling for weeks. But even with 3 swing votes from across the aisle, there were only 53 total votes. The bill failed. In total, 44 democrats voted against the bill, including all seven Democrat presidential candidates:

But, bad press or not, voting down a bill that would prevent child-abuse, ablism, and infanticide is still a head-scratcher. What were they thinking? How could they do this? Why would 44 Democrats vote down a bill that would protect living, born, children?

Bill Sasse vs. Ralph Northam

One would think a strong stance against child-abuse, ablism, and infanticide would draw unanimous consent. The bill’s founder, Senator Bill Sasse (R-NE), championed this bill precisely for that purpose, to establish unanimous agreement that, whether pro-choice or pro-life, we can all agree that born children deserve basic care and protection even if they survived a botched abortion.

This bill would, at least, be a gesture of defiance against statements like that of Virginia governor Ralph Northam that ambiguate precisely where we need moral clarity the most. Defending a late-term abortion-choice bill, Northam said of late-term abortions, medically complicated deliveries that, “the infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired.”

Now, Northam may not have intended his words to sound as scandalous as they did. But, at minimum, he stated his support for late-term abortion access – even till the moment just before birth. He left open any legal loopholes that may threaten children who survive abortion (i.e., unreported child-abuse, passive euthanasia, negligent homicide, etc., unreported murder). And he explicitly refused to mention the humanity of those fetal humans.

Republican Motivations

Republican motivations aren’t too hard to figure out. Their pro-life platform fits well with the bill’s strong stance against abuse, infanticide, and ablism.

Republicans may have also been grandstanding, seizing on the radical leftward swing of Democrats. Republicans can pick up some moderate voters who don’t want to follow the Dems towards a social-democrat platform (incl., socialized healthcare and unrestricted abortion access). Anti-trumpism has swelled the sails of the Democrat fleet, so much so that Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and a groundswell of social-democrat voters have found a home in the Democrat party. The left is pulling farther left.

But, as the Democrat establishment is reaching for voters on the radical left, they may have overextended themselves, marginalizing their moderate-liberal base. Democrat overreach smells like opportunity for Republicans. Enter the Born-Alive bill.

This spate of radical pro-choice bills seem to be (1) doomsday prepping their Democrat states in the event of a pro-life apocalypse (i.e., Roe v. Wade overturned). And (2) they’re aligning their political actions with resource channels from the abortion-choice and feminist lobby. 2019 is a big fundraising year for the anti-trump campaign season. Democrats can help secure precious campaign contributions and public endorsements with big pro-choice political gestures.

All that means Republicans come out winners on this Born-Alive bill. Even though the bill was sidelined by a Democrat “No” vote, it’s a symbolic victory for Republicans for exposing the radical left-wing swing among Senate Democrats. Dems showed more solidarity than humanity on this vote. And it gave Republicans a chance to pat themselves on the back for their pro-life humanitarianism.

Democrat Motivations

The Republican reasoning doesn’t seem to complicated. But the motivation for Democrats is not as easy to understand. I’ll try to give the Democrats the benefit of the doubt, even though we all know that a healthy dose of skepticism is warranted whenever politicians are talking, whether Democrats or Republicans.

1. Consistency: Opposition to all things Republican.

Perhaps Democrats generally oppose any Republican bill. If it’s a bad bill, they can stand against it on principle. If it’s a good bill, then they can have a Democrat write and propose something just like it and then focus on supporting that one. Score: Dems 1, Repubs 0. We live in painfully partisan times and Dems and Repubs could both be doing this. Democrats were already filibustering the bill. They were stringing it along so it would never get a chance for a final vote. But, things escalated when a motion was made for cloture (limiting the time of debate so a final vote could happen). Monday’s vote rejected cloture, extending the filibuster, effectively aborting the anti-infanticide bill.

2. Solidarity: Unite or die

Second, another motivation is solidarity. To be fair, three Democrats did stray from the party line voting the other way: Doug Jones (AL), Joe Manchin (WV), and Bob Casey (PA). But 44 other Senate Democrats stood their ground and voted to reject cloture so the filibuster would win. Needing 60 votes to break the filibuster, Republicans could only pool 53 votes. Solidarity is a strong-suit for Senate Democrats.

3. Abortion-choice: On demand and without apology

Third, senate democrats apparently saw this bill primarily as an anti-abortion measure. According to New York Times columnist Denise Grady, they thought “the bill was aimed at discouraging doctors from performing legal abortions.” Discouraging abortions would, normally, be a good thing if Democrats wanted to keep abortion “safe, legal, and rare.” But with recent trends, Democrats are favoring, “abortion on demand and without apology.” That is, unrestricted abortion access.

In reality, the bill wasn’t discouraging doctors from legal abortions but discouraging doctors from botching abortions, and if they did botch an abortion, they would be required to act as healthcare providers now that there’s a new patient under their care. Legally speaking, born children are already legal persons. Nevertheless, Democrats defended their no-vote with typical buzzwords: “Women’s health,” “her body, her choice,” “private decision between a woman and her doctor,” and scolding “government intrusion” in women’s health decisions. I’m not mocking the kernel of truth in each of these phrases, but the way they are thoughtlessly used, without nuance, and without maturing with the times these talking points sound like a public speaker who hasn’t updated his material since the 1980’s.

Plus, these responses ring hollow when it’s no longer a “private” one-on-one decision between a woman and her doctor. There’s a crying newborn baby interrupting that private conversation between her mom and the doctor. The time for abortion has passed once the child is born, so the typical “abortion” rhetoric doesn’t fit. Neonates are legally protected as distinct persons from their mothers. So “women’s health” should now include female babies. And the conversation must shift to include basic protections against infanticide.

4. Mistaken Identity: Abortion on Demand and . . . hey wait! What?

Fourth, Democrats failed to appreciate how this bill isn’t really about abortion, it’s about infanticide. All the public discussion about this bill, now, keeps mentioning “infanticide.” But as long as Senate Democrats were directing the conversation they could recast this bill as a covert anti-abortion bill. Now, to be fair, failed-abortions set the context for this bill, but this bill is still about infanticide. It offers at least a representative stance interrupting any abortion-provider who might be tempted to cover the tracks of his malpractice by committing infanticide.

5. Allegiance: Planned Parenthood said it first.

Fifth, senate democrats may have been allying with their well-known sponsors in Planned Parenthood and the abortion lobby. Planned Parenthood representatives have gone on record supporting the infanticide option, as long as that is the decision between the mother and her doctor.

6. Defensive Medicine: Is it malpractice if the child survives?

Sixth, Democrats were likely protecting the interests of abortion-providers concerned about medical malpractice issues. It’s bad enough when clinicians can get sued over a bad root canal or a misdiagnosis. But malpractice suits can get downright absurd when the physician isn’t doing healthcare but deathcare, surgically harming and destroying an otherwise healthy, innocent, human being. If the surgeon fails to complete the abortion the mother is left with a living, and likely mutilated, baby, like some live-action guilt trip constantly reminding her that she tried to kill her baby. The psychological and emotional trauma for the mother is bad enough with the abortion and it could be even worse if the fetal victim carries the physical scars of a botched abortion for the rest of his or her life. Of course, the physician looks like a hack if he botches such a straightforward procedure as abortion.

Plus, the 2002 bill does not specify abortion-survivors even though they constitute a special case. Clinical conditions cloak abortions in secrecy. As long as there is no required reporting, no mandated punishment, and no explicit enforcement, clinicians have no compelling legal interest to protect the life of children who survive abortion. Quite the opposite, they have a strong motivation for infanticide, preferably without letting the mother know they botched the abortion in the first place. She paid to get rid of a child, so that’s what she gets. Any failed procedure is an open door for a malpractice suit.

8. Euthanasia/Eugenics: Put them out of their suffering.

Eighth, this vote also exposed how abortion-choice ideology flows seamlessly into euthanasia (“mercy killing”) and eugenics (selective breeding). Defenders of late-term abortion have often resorted to euthanasia and eugenic-abortion to justify killing unwanted children-in-utero. Fetal abnormalities, handicaps, and in the case of abortion-survivors, severe injury, can put children in a great deal of pain, sometimes for the rest of their lives. But those lives are still not our possession to destroy at will. And both euthanasia and eugenics are “playing God.” Plus, they reek of “ableism.”

By the way, there’s a straightforward way to reduce all suffering and eliminate all birth defects, diseases, and deformities from the population. Just kill everyone. It’s no more reasonable to apply that vicious logic in smaller doses – killing only some people. Even if euthanasia and eugenics were bolstered by good intentions they are still bad ideas. The road to hell is equally paved with bad ideas and good intentions.

9. Symbolism: Republican anti-abortion grandstanding

Ninth, perhaps senate democrats considered this bill to be more symbolic than practical. It has become a rallying cry for pro-life conservatives to show their support for children inside and outside the womb. But, even if this bill is symbolic, it still symbolizes the humanitarian and life-affirming culture we should all uphold, regardless of our political stripes. Plus, this bill isn’t merely symbolic since there’s a substantial number of abortion survivors (see #10 below). If they are too injured to survive for long, this bill would still ensure they receive comfort care to reduce their suffering (without artificially hastening their death). And if the child might survive, this bill would ensure they get reasonable care just like any other human patient would receive. This bill promotes equal opportunity and equal access, regardless of disability or circumstance. Children deserve our loving care.

10. Rarity: These cases are so rare, we don’t need a law for it.

Tenth, some sources tried to minimize this problem claiming it’s so uncommon that this bill would be a wasted effort. Late term abortion is so rare, according to the Wall Street Journal, that only 1.3% of abortions happen after 24 weeks, so the chances of a child surviving a late-term abortion are vanishingly small. But, there’s a problem with that number. “1.3%” sounds like an inconsequential number, but with roughly 1,000,000 total abortions per year, 1.3% is still 13,000 abortions. If even 1% of those result in live births, by accident, then that’s 130 children who would have been protected by this bill.

To put that in perspective, imagine if a Republican banner issue like the border wall led to the deaths of 130 unclaimed immigrant children. Now imagine that Republicans had just voted against the most basic medical care for those suffering children. We’ve already seen capital hill democrats rally around the health and family concerns for undocumented children. And the death toll hasn’t come close to 130.

11. Cognitive Dissonance: Harmonious Wrongs Sound Better

Perhaps the saddest and most contemptible reason for voting against the Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act is that it harmonizes with radical abortion-choice ideology.

Cognitive Dissonance refers to that discomfort people feel when experience disagreement in their beliefs and/or behaviors. We desperately want to resolve that conflict so our beliefs and behaviors can all agree with each other. For Democrats, abortion-choice policy is a gateway to cognitive dissonance. Unrestricted abortion access has been a growing banner for the Trump-era Democrat party, but to make that policy fit with Democrat ideals they will have to surrender any fundamental commitment to:

Anti-Eugenics – “unrestricted access” allows killing “defective” babies so they never grow up and reproduce.

Anti-Euthanasia – “unrestricted access” allows “mercy-killing” so the child never has to suffer the pain of a cleft palet, a club foot, or any other birth defect, injury, or developmental disorder.

Anti-death penalty – abortion administers a capital punishment without any capital crime; it’s the death penalty without due process, criminal conviction, or even any moral wrongdoing on the part of the victim.

Fetal heartbeat or brainwaves – the right-to-life cannot begin at the fetal heartbeat or first brainwaves since those begin around week 6 of pregnancy.

Viability – the right-to-life cannot begin at viability, since that’s around 21-22 weeks.

Capping it all off, the Democrat “no” vote is a stark reminder that the birth-canal does not magically confer some new life, or new humanity, on the child. For the children in question, birth is an arbitrary dividing line between viable humans in the womb and viable humans out of the womb. If it’s legal to kill child-in-utero at 40 weeks gestation, just before delivery, then it’s ghoulishly consistent for abortion doctors to commit negligent homicide towards a feeble, mutilated, abortion-survivor at 22 weeks. The mother wanted to get rid of her baby, so that’s what she gets.

Voting “No” on the abortion-survivors act is consistent with the Democrat pillar of liberal abortion-choice policy. But it’s a stark contradiction with purported Democrat values of compassion, empathy, humanitarianism, and equality.

A Crisis of Conscience

Democrats stand at a crossroads. Liberal Abortion choice policy threatens to split the party wide open, exposing gross betrayal of the party’s humanitarian values with a litany of evils (incl., infanticide, child abuse, and ableism). But, the party can’t solve this problem without difficulty. They are close comrades with liberal-feminism and are financially entrenched within the abortion-choice lobby. This tension puts a big question mark on the Democrat party. What do they value more: robust humanitarian ethics, or unrestricted abortion-access?

As long as Democrats suppress this crisis of conscience, stifling their cognitive dissonance, we can expect them to keep celebrating radical abortion-choice policy even to the point of voting down by bills protecting born children.

But I suspect many Democrats are genuine humanitarians. If Democrats are not just exploiting emotions to win political games, if they are willing to earn their virtues before virtue-signaling for political points, if they are serious about their humanitarian values even to the point of breaking ranks with their party, then they will have to match their politics with the humanitarian values they so loudly proclaim. Voting “No” on this bill leaves Democrats dangerously exposed. Now, they have to explain away their refusal to protect these living, breathing, post-birth children from infanticide.

If you are a pro-life man, like me, then you’ve heard a hundred times that men need to shut up about abortion. Apparently, we men have no right to talk about abortion unless, perhaps, we’re voicing pro-choice solidarity. #girlpower

Why should men be silent? – The “No Womb, No Say” Position

Just being honest here, some men probably do need to shut their pie hole, but that’s because they’re lying, manipulative, idiot, blowhards. I’m sure you’ve met a few of those. Fortunately, that’s not every man. Some men have a word worth hearing. They can even have a timely word of protest against abortion. Sadly, a lot of people still believe that men have no right to protest abortion. This is the “no womb, no say” position.

Now “no womb, no say” is all sorts of wrong, but it’s not entirely wrong. We have to admit a kernel of truth to this popular maneuver. According to Captain Obvious, “Men can’t get pregnant.” Men don’t know what it feels like to be pregnant, carry a child to term, or have an abortion. We’ll never squirt out a seven-pound chunk of living flesh unless we have an organ removed. Abortion directly impacts women in the most intimate way. But, for men, it’s always indirect and it’s never as intimate.

There’s also a history of sexism getting in the way of things. Even today, it’s not hard, to find dark alleys, studios, and industries where women are treated terribly. Liberals and conservatives can debate about the extent of that problem, but we can all agree that there have been many cases of genuine sexism against women. We can also agree that one of the key reasons for the Roe v. Wade (1973) ruling was based on equalizing rights for women. Today, most all of us can agree, across political aisles and in every sector of society, that women have (or should have) an equal or greater voice on the subject of abortion.

But no one, in good conscience, should grant that women have the only voice on abortion. Given the scale of abortion (60 million in the U.S., 1.5 billion globally), and it’s profound and lasting effects on families, communities, nations, and the whole world, it is unconscionable to exclude fully 50% of society from that pregnant conversation. Here are…

59 Reasons Why Men Need To Speak Out About Abortion

If men can make abortion-choice policy they can unmake it – seven old white guys legalized it nationally in Roe v. Wade (1973), and four white guys and one black guy just might overturn it if the stars align just right. If the men on the supreme court were to refuse to comment on abortion in pertinent cases, that would amount to a miscarriage of justice and dereliction of duty.

Men played a huge role in creating abortion-culture, we owe it to society to clean up our mess – Men at have been known to support abortion policy, coerce women into abortion, abuse women, abandon families, and do various things that pressure women into having an abortion. Not all men are doing this, but all men should be working to undo the mess we’ve made.

Men can protest abortion just as non-slaves can protest slavery, and white people can protest racism– if we don’t have to be black or a slave to oppose racism and slavery, then we don’t have to be women to oppose abortion. Bear in mind, abortion-choice policy currently permits race-based and gender-based abortion. So abortion is not just analogous to racism and sexism, abortion policy is racist and sexist. And everyone should oppose those things.

Men can support the pro-life cause just like they supported women’s suffrage (voting)– Early feminists (A.K.A., First Wave), were committed to women’s suffrage and openly rejected abortion. They argued that it would lead to exploitation and violence against women. Men can unite with the better parts of feminism by agreeing with voting rights, and opposing abortion, just like they did.

For men to comply with abortion-choice policy is suspiciously self-serving – Man-boy syndrome is real folks, and abortion is a factor. The latest numbers on marriage show our marriage rate is declining. Traditional marriages haven’t been faring too well since the sexual revolution, and definitely since Roe v. Wade (1973). Yet across world history, the most effective means for civilizing males on large scale is with marriage and fatherhood. Abortion-choice culture makes it easier to avoid both. In the old days, unplanned pregnancy led to a shotgun wedding. That’s not the best way to do things, but at least no one died from it. Now, abortion-choice interrupts the ceremony, “Stop the Wedding! She’s not pregnant!” Plus, abortion-choice is also portrayed as liberation for women, like it’s some great equalizer, empowering women to be on level ground with men in society. In reality, abortion standardized a roving “masculine” sexuality that never served well for women’s flourishing. Women have been lamenting ever since 1973 how much harder it is to find a good man who’s willing to settle down and start a family. Why on earth would a man settle down and start a family when his aggressive, roving, independent nature yearns to spread his seed wherever he can and virtually nothing in society discourages him from doing so? It’s not like he needs to procreate a boy child to inherit his kingdom, or have a gaggle of kiddos to help him run the farm. Abortion did not dignify feminine distinctives of child-birth and motherhood. Instead, it weaponized maternity, aiming the kill shot at their own child-in-utero. Meanwhile, non-committal man-boys can slink into the night without even a paternity suit to reel them back in. Abortion-choice works like a “get out of jail free” card for all the immature, predatory, and boyish males who think marriage and fatherhood are prison.

Abortion is not just a women’s issue– the fallout from abortion isn’t limited to women, so it’s not just a “women’s issue.” It’s an “everyone issue.”

Abortion can damage the moral health of culture, society, and whole nations – Ditto times two.

Some abortion survivors are men – Ditto times three. It would be patently absurd to claim that a man who has been maimed by a botched abortion, like Nik Hoot, has no right to speak against abortion. People who’ve been harmed by abortion have a vested personal interest in trying to protect others from abortion.

As long as abortion is about human rights then all humans have a rightful voice on the matter – Abortion is about women’s rights, but it’s also about human rights broadly since it presses the question about when exactly do developing humans in utero acquire human rights.

Female-led Organizations like Live Action , Eagle Forum, and Silent No More, encourage men to speak up on the issue – There is no unified voice, from women, telling men to shut up about abortion. Quite the opposite, females who are mobilized vocal and influential can be found encouraging pro-life men to speak up.

Many other women don’t want men to be silent on abortion – Feminists are divided on several issues, including this one. Some women are happy to let a gentleman open their door, carry their groceries, and speak out against abortion. Often these women are quite liberated, empowered, and flourishing without any concern whatsoever about patriarchal oppression or toxic masculinity. They are too busy enjoying their family and exercising their freedom to be bothered with p*ssy hats and progressive politics. Maternal feminists, like Christina Hoff Sommers, typically appreciate the role of active, vocal, and even protective men in their lives, especially when it comes to issues as big as abortion.

Medical experts, on abortion, are often men – Silencing them amounts to willful ignorance. They are worth hearing.

Legal experts, on abortion, are often men – Ignorance is bad. Male experts are worth hearing.

Scientific experts, on abortion, are often men – Ignorance is still bad. And male experts are still worth hearing.

It’s an overreach – Neither women, nor men, have the right or the authority to demand each other to collectively shut up about anything.

Men can offer relational and emotional support– When a pregnant woman wants to choose life so long as she can find some encouragement from a trusted male friend or family member, in that case, the “no womb, no say” position muffles those men, leaving that woman less support in their time of need. Women often see trusted male friends as allies, not enemies. So they welcome a male perspective as words from a trusted friend.

If men can help a woman have an abortion, then they should at least be able to help her not have one– Demanding that men show support or stay out of it, even at the expense of their conscience, is to demand that they be cowards, immoral, or both. Civilized society should not wish for men to be immoral cowards.

Some women don’t want to make the abortion-decision for themselves– I’m a married man, and I grew up with a mother and sister. And I can testify, from experience, that sometimes women want the most trusted man in their life to make the decision on her behalf. Maybe some women aren’t like this. But many women are. They don’t just want a strong, wise, and loving man who will step in for the big decisions, they yearn for a man like that. The “no womb, no say” position handicaps those women by demanding that all the men in their lives stay silent, even if they are strong, wise, loving, and great decision-makers for the family.

Truth doesn’t have a sex/gender– If something is true about abortion, it’s still true even if a man says it. Moral facts are still the facts, no matter if a man or a woman is speaking.

Men have access to moral facts just as much as women do – just as moral facts don’t care what sex/gender you are, knowing moral facts is likewise open to men and women.

There are sex/gender-neutral reasons for doubting the “my body, my right” argument undergirding this “women only” mentality – It’s never been clearly shown, legally, that the right of privacy includes the privilege of intentionally killing one’s own, innocent, non-threatening, non-combatant, child-in-utero. Also, Roe v. Wade was argued on the belief that we are not sure when biological human life begins but that question has long been settled: new human life begins at conception. Moreover, the “my body, my right” argument promotes extremism, and contradicts normal guardian responsibilities. If the bodily autonomy isn’t enough to even justify abortion, then it’s not enough to justify silencing all male voices on abortion either.

“No womb, No Say” is sexist against men– The “no womb, no say” position is blatant sexism, discriminating against millions of people because of their sex/gender. It’s not the tame kind of discrimination either, like when employers discriminate against job applicants who are lazy incompetent nitwits. We’re talking about the lame kind of discrimination, attempting to restrict freedom of speech marginalize men even if when the man was permanently handicapped in a botched abortion, or when he’s been traumatized by watching, assisting, or conducting an abortion, or if they’ve walked their wives through the long-term side effects of a past abortion.

Abortion-Choice Policy Promotes Sexism against women – Not only is the “no womb, no say” position sexist, but abortion choice policy itself is sexist. Sex-selective abortion is currently legal, and that means girls in utero are sometimes aborted just because they are girls. Abortion also has a bad history of promoting negative health outcomes for women. Abortion itself is a violent act against women, especially when the mother’s “consent” is blurred with heavy pressure from parents or partners. And perhaps the most glaring problem sexism in abortion is how it enables irresponsible and selfish males to exploit women. They can “love ’em and leave ’em”.

It’s hypocritical to encourage pro-choice men to speak up and prohibit pro-life men from doing the same– NARAL, URGE, and other supporters of the “Bro Choice” movement encourage men to speak up so long as they are supporting abortion-choice.

It’s hypocritical to accept the verdict of Roe v. Wade (1973) and then say that men shouldn’t have a voice on the issue – Seven out of nine old white guys, on the supreme court, decided that abortion should be legalized across the nation.

If pro-choice advocates tried to undo the hypocrisy, and still keep men silent about abortion, they would have to reject what men have already said on abortion – besides just the Roe v. Wade ruling, if male voices were muffled then that would have to reject the established insights from men in the past, regarding abortion, including expert testimony from doctors, judges, scientists, attorneys, pollsters, technicians, politicians, academics and scholars.

“No womb, No Say” is a veiled attempt to stifle opposition – Pro-choice powers don’t really want men, generally, to be silent, they want pro-life men to be silent. It’s not a matter of ethics and rights, it’s a matter of convenience. It’s easier to advance a pro-choice agenda if roughly half of the opposition is silent.

It takes two to tango – men are half of the pregnancy equation. Having a role in creating the child, it’s not clear why men would have no role when it comes to the (preventing the) fate of the child. Ideally, childbearing should be a team effort and not a lone burden for women.

The Good Samaritan Rule – Morally we’re responsible to do the good that we can do. Tim Brahm of Equal Rights Institute explains this point with a story about watching a depressed woman attempt to drown her newborn child, then Brahm says, “Now, I’m a man. I’ve never been pregnant. I’ve never been a mother. I will never know what she is going through. . . But even though I can’t understand what she’s going through, shouldn’t I try to do something to save that kid?” Good question!

Some women cannot get pregnant – By the logic of “no womb no way” those women would be denied a voice on the abortion issue.

Men have freedom of speech, just like women do – If women can speak out about prostate cancer, and they have every right do so, then men can speak about abortion. The first amendment works either way.

Abortion contradicts paternity rights– It is legally inconsistent for women to be able to ‘walk away from a pregnancy (abortion), while men are denied that right. Instead, men can be forced to pay child support even when they didn’t want to be a father. This inconsistency might be unjust, and so, men have reason to speak up.

Men should use their privilege in society to offer solidarity with good causes – Supposing that men have a lot privilege in society, we therefore have a moral duty to exercise our privilege in support of good. Fighting against the deadliest act against fellow human beings in world history is a worthy candidate.

It’s good to defend those who can’t defend themselves, regardless of sex/gender – Their silent scream cannot be heard, so people with a voice need to speak up for them. Men and women alike can intercede for the voiceless.

Abortion is an intersectional issue so that silencing men is too simplistic to represent it fairly – There are several different inequalities tied into abortion-choice policy. There are potential inequalities between men and women. But we can also point to inequalities along racial lines, or health, age, and so forth. Some of the most influential and expert witnesses for age discrimination, ableism, and racism are males. Silencing males on the issue of abortion restricts the voices protesting ableism, ageism, and racism. Another way to make this point is that if every “privileged” group was disqualified from speaking about abortion, then only elderly, infertile, handicapped, black, Muslim, lesbians would be allowed to speak about abortion.

Men can help deter the jerks who pressure women towards abortion – Male influence can be positive or negative. It’s true that some males are horrible human beings: abusive, predatory, deviants, who exploit women, and coerce them into abortion. These jerks need every societal corrective we can throw at them – police, prosecutors, jailers, therapists, etc. But often they descend into deviancy for lack of a healthy father figure or positive male friends. When decent men are involved as Big Brothers, for example, they can help counteract many of the factors driving women to abortion, such as coercion, poverty, abuse, abandonment, etc. That won’t work in all cases, but it will work for some. Decent upstanding men can help create a family friendly pro-life culture just by modeling redemptive manhood.

Men can work with women in teaching a family-based model of pregnancy – It’s no surprise that most women seeking abortion are not married or even in a healthy stable family. Healthy stable families are a historically well-established way to raise up the kind of people who don’t have unplanned pregnancies. Men and women together can promote healthy marriage, and parenting as a means of curbing abortion.

Men are justified in wanting to defend women from harm – if chivalry is dead it’s because feminism killed it. But good men can always resurrect it, especially if it means protecting women from the violence in and around abortion.

Men can speak up through their actions – Male culture is more than words. A healthy masculine voice is not just spoken, it’s modeled. Raising a child is hard work anyway, but it gets even harder when men don’t step up as fathers, friends, and husbands. Far too many men already lack the maturity, courage, and commitment to come alongside the women in their lives to help them choose life. Sometimes the most powerful words we can share about abortion are voiced in silent strength and quiet commitment.

Fathers should be able to talk with their daughters about abortion – Fathers have a natural right and responsibility to raise their daughters, and that includes talking about sex, love, marriage, parenting, and of course the immeasurable value of human life.

Husbands should be able to talk with their wives about abortion – healthy marriages should share decision making, and work as a team in their family planning. Silent men would be a disservice to wives who are wanting the support and input of their husbands.

Brothers should be able to talk with their sisters about abortion – Healthy sibling relationships are another family tie where guys can have the rapport with their sisters to talk about important things like sexual health, pregnancy, and abortion.

Women should be free to get counsel and advice from males – Male counselors, religious leaders, and caring friends can be a tremendous help for women in a crisis pregnancy. If men are supposed to shut up about abortion then they are handicapped in their ability to help.

Silent men are a waste of resources –Disenfranchised males can be incredibly dangerous. Every society has an enormous burden in deciding what to do with the boys. When boys don’t have to mature, settle down, or become gentlemen to be accepted in society, then they will tend to settle for adolescence, never marrying, never committing to fatherhood, slinking towards addiction, apathy, violence, and crime. The problem isn’t as simple as “toxic masculinity.” Males are a resource in society; they can spoil if neglected and explode when broken. But when they are mobilized and directed towards human flourishing they are an irreplaceable source of innovation, defense, and development. With the issue of abortion, men can be incredibly useful. Besides lending strength, compassion, and service, they can have insights, research, and sage counsel to help struggling mothers in their time of need. It would be a pity to lock away all those resources just because of casual pro-choice rhetoric.

Excluding men reduces diversity – We can learn a lot if we listen to a diverse array of voices sharing insights into issues that matter. Silencing all (pro-life) men artificially restricts that diversity.

Men who care about the health and direction of the nation should speak up about abortion as it ties into our founding principles as a nation, i.e., an equal right to life from our creation onward – It has been said that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. The benefits of a free and humanitarian society will not defend themselves. We the people have a duty, as citizens, to protect the better parts of our society, and that includes the notion of “equal rights.” The Declaration of Independence says, “all men [humans] are created equal . . . endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights . . . life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Our founding fathers didn’t know, at that time, that the biological moment of creation is at conception. And if we are going to avoid infusing some spiritually weighted notion about souls, then we have to legally treat that moment of creation as a biological question – the moment of conception, the onset of biological human life. See more about this point in my debate at UT-Arlington (TX).

It’s not humanitarian to restrict whole demographics from discussing a human rights issue – the history of human rights legislation has, for the most part, been a gradual unveiling of our equal rights as human beings. But that process has had many pitfalls and perils. We cannot trust that any one group will safely lead the way without vital corrections arising from other groups. In this way, all of us are part of an ongoing conversation about the nature, extent, and grounding of our human rights. There is no settled and final conclusion, whether in the court of law, in the class room, or in the science lab, dictating that men need to stay out of the abortion issue. It would contradict our humanitarian values as a nation to silence whole sectors of humanity because of their race, age, sex/gender.

Silencing men is close-minded – No one on earth is 100% right all the time. We should be open-minded enough to where we can keep learning and correct our mistakes. Silencing an entire demographic does not signal open-mindedness. It’s dogmatic and close-minded

Silencing men forces weird results with the LGBTQ movement – Do biological females lose their right to speak if they identify as a male? What if they have been pregnant before, but still identify as a male? What if a biological male identifies as a female, does that person get their voice back?

“No womb, no say” discriminates against intersex people – Some people are born with male and female sex organs. They are not strictly male or female, biologically speaking. Yet, the “no womb, no say” argument operates on a simple binary notion that women can speak up but not men. What about intersex people? To my knowledge, intersex people are typically infertile but there may be exceptions that I’m not aware of. We are guaranteed to distort the issue if we frame an issue as a binary/dichotomous when it has three or more parties involved (male, female, and intersex).

Silent men have done enough damage already – Far too many men are passive, wimpy, indifferent loafers too selfish and scared to protect, support, and honor the women in their lives. So it’s no surprise when those women end up having an abortion because they never had the support network they needed. No gentleman stepped in as a husband, a brother, a friend, or a father, to lend the support she needed to choose life.

These are just the first 59 reasons I could come up with. But that’s more than enough to prove that “no womb, no say” is a myth. Silencing men is a popular pro-choice tactic designed to smother opposition and shame men into silence. It’s worked well over the years. Perhaps if more men had stepped into the mix with a gentle voice of concern or a careful word of wisdom, then we might not be in this predicament, staring at an abortion total that dwarfs the holocaust ten-fold, literally. Men, your voice matters. Don’t just stand quiet on the sidelines hoping that your wives, sisters, daughters, and female friends will all do the right thing. Speak up! A word of compassion and truth just might make the difference between life and death.

*****

If you are pro-life and you would like to discover your voice, or if you are eager to speak but you aren’t sure what to say, then you can get some great conversation training with the organization I work with, Equal Rights Institute (ERI). Just because you have a voice doesn’t mean you know how to use it. That’s why groups like ERI exist, we want to help pro-life advocates to think clearly, reason honestly, and argue persuasively.